Original air date: 10/2/2022
Rick and Jerry investigate a fortune cookie factory after receiving a weird fortune.
Tropes:
- Abusive Offspring: Morty and Summer amp up to this by cruelly pranking Jerry over his fear of his fortune coming true. Even Rick is disturbed by it.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Rick is vocally amused when the "sticks to walls" guard is seemingly escaping being sucked into the rift, suggesting he didn't get such a lame fortune after all. This is before his body implodes and is sucked apart from the pressure.
- Airvent Passageway: Rick and Jerry hide in the building's duct system to evade capture.
- Aside Comment: Rick and Jerry look towards the audience to say fortune cookies are alien poop.
- Bestiality Is Depraved: Downplayed with Old M. Hucksbee, who tends to the Lockerean alien creature that makes the cookies and creates the fortunes that go in them, and wants to escape the facility and marry her so that he can have sex with her (he's a strict Catholic, so he can't have sex until he marries her). He doesn't see anything wrong with this until he witnesses the Lockerean killing her captors through instinct. Realizing she's just a wild animal that is incapable of human consent, he calmly accepts his grisly death.
- At the end, he mentions Margaret Howe Lovatt, who worked with dolphins and frequently masturbated one of them so he could get on with his training.
- Blessed with Suck: Two of the guards get some powers that aren't as good as they sound on paper:
- One gets immortality, but as Rick explains, it doesn't mean he can't feel extreme pain.
- Another one gets the ability to stick to walls, which Rick exploits to stick him to a wall on his back. Rick changes his opinion later when this condition seems to protect him from a black hole... except his internal organs aren't protected from the gravity and are sucked out through his mouth.
- Boom, Headshot!: One of Jennith's mooks gets a fortune that guarantees these in his fight with Rick. Fortunately, Rick is mildly bulletproof, so the initial barrage doesn't kill him. Sadly for the guard, Rick then forces him to headshot his fellow guards and friends instead, and then tricks him into shooting himself by ducking his head inside his body like a turtle, causing the bullet to reverse in midair and hit the guard's own head.
- Bottomless Magazines: Enforced. One guard gets the fortune of having infinite ammo, which leads him to accidentally shooting the guard who cannot be killed.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: The fortune cookies in the Cold Open are: hard work often pays off, family time is time well spent, family time is time well spent, you will have sex with your mother.
- Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Jennith Padrow-Chunt, the CEO of the Fortune 500 company, has a fortune that guarantees that she will become the most successful female corporate worker on the planet, an unattainable goal that makes her immortal as long as it remains unresolved. Rick makes her fortune come true by using a dark web account to hack into Goldman-Sachs, remove trillions of dollars, and completely buy out her entire business, thus fulfilling the condition and stripping away her protection. He then transfers the money back to Goldman-Sachs just to rub it in her face.
- Brick Joke:
- Rick uses a Sailor Moon Transformation Sequence to change Jerry's clothes, noting that the sequence can be used in the future to save money if Jerry ever needs a costume change again. This outfit ends up getting destroyed by the end of the episode, and when his mother suggests getting him some clothes, Rick jumps at the chance to use the transformation sequence again to restore Jerry's clothes, noting with a grin that he can just feel how much money they're saving.
- One that comes back twice: it's established right at the beginning that Summer and Morty changed Rick's ringtone to the Taxi theme as a small prank on him. When Rick is preparing his assault on Panda Express and asks his ship to play the first song on his "favorites" playlist, this theme starts playing, and Rick decides to just go with it. Then, this is the song that plays over the closing credits.
- The Stinger shows visitors in the zoo's ad eating the food for the animals, which Jerry is said to have done on his last visit.
- Bulletproof Human Shield:
- Played with when Rick grabs Jerry and uses him as a shield against the guards because Jerry's unresolved fate makes him unkillable until it's fulfilled. It's less that Jerry is literally bulletproof than the fact that, because his fate is unresolved, any attempt to kill him is doomed to fail and the bullets just miss.
- Played straight with a guard who has been granted immortality, but none of the Required Secondary Powers. The bullets should have still gone straight through him and into Rick.
- The Bus Came Back: The first appearance of Jerry's mother, Joyce Smith, since Season 1's "Anatomy Park".
- Character Alignment: Discussed in-universe by Rick when he steals trillions of dollars from Goldman-Sachs via the dark web to fulfill Jennith's fortune and render her mortal; he then returns all of the money to them and claims that it's because he sits "dead-center on the alignment chart".
- Chekhov's Gun: Once Rick starts fighting Jennith's mooks at Fortune 500, he tries to dig into the boxes of fate-controlling fortune cookies to find some that will give him an edge. We specifically see him eat one with a fortune that says "You will make a new friend", as Rick groans that all the fortunes in that box are useless. However, he reveals to Jerry later that this fortune still counted, and because Rick hadn't made any new friends since eating it, he was immortal until Jerry just referred to him as a "friend" a moment before, completing the condition and nulling his immortality.
- Continuity Nod:
- Jerry remarks that Sleepy Gary ruined his gag reflex, "which is annoying, because Sleepy Gary wasn't real."
- Rick's suit and especially his sunglasses make him look like Cool Rick from "The Ricklantis Mixup".
- Country Matters: The Gwyneth Paltro expy is named Jennith Padrow Chunt.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Rick vs. the entire staff of Panda Express. He slaughters most of them effortlessly, before establishing with the last few still alive that there's been a misunderstanding.
- Cutting the Knot: When Rick and Jerry reach the end of the Airvent Passageway, it's blocked by a hatch. Jerry suggests Rick use his screwdriver fingers to open it but Rick is so annoyed with him at this point that he uses the currently-immortal Jerry's body as a spearhead to burst through the hatch.
- Destroy the Security Camera: Discussed and then averted. Upon observing the truly ridiculous number of cameras at Fortune 500, Jerry asks if Rick could simply disable all of them. Rick responds that he could, but his obvious sabotage would raise an alert. Instead, they go incognito.
- Disappointed by the Motive: Rick uses his Enemy Scan on Jennith to find out what her unresolved fortune is that makes her immortal (which she chose for herself), and is incredulous to learn that it's "become the most successful businesswoman on Earth".Rick: You could do anything you wanted and you chose...work.
- Dissonant Serenity: Justified; Jerry's mom is (understandably) Locked Out of the Loop about Jerry's fortune and everything happening with Fortune 500, and cheerfully waves hello to her son after she's been brought there, while poor Jerry is horrified.
- The Dog Bites Back: Once the Lockerean—who, as lampshaded by Hucksbee, is basically a wild animal held captive against its will—is freed from its restraints, it's quick to maul and kill pretty much everyone it encounters, many of whom are at least partially responsible for holding it captive, like the remainder of the guards and Jennith. It also rips apart Hucksbee himself, not that he minds too much.
- Dope Slap: Rick gives one to Jerry after he squanders his fortune and tops it off with a cheesy one-liner. Unexpectedly, Rick ends up feeling kind of bad about it afterwards.
- Dumbass Has a Point: Jerry posits the idea to Rick that they should just blow up the Fortune 500 building they're infiltrating. Rick initially dismisses the idea because he wants to take the source of their fate-altering powers for himself, but when the two of them and Hucksbee are cornered by Jennith and her squad (who've also "captured" Joyce), he admits they really should've just blown it up. Ultimately, it does end up getting destroyed by the void.
- Easily Forgiven: After the Panda Express workers realize Rick is after information about their fortune cookies rather than their meth like they thought, they all stop fighting and share a laugh about the misunderstanding and forgive Rick for the employees he killed since it "comes with the territory".
- Edible Ammunition: Rick loads the unassigned fortune cookies into slots on his shoulders and shoots them into the mouths of the guards to exploit their random effects on whoever eats them.
- Enemy Scan: Once Rick gets his hands on one of the Fortune 500 guards' tablets, he uses his high-tech sunglasses to scan it, which allows the glasses to do this to everyone else; in this case, it shows him what their unresolved fortunes are.
- Everyone Has Standards: Rick gets several instances throughout the episode:
- He looks rather disturbed by Morty and Summer bullying Jerry about his fortune, and later lies to Beth and the kids that it may actually have some supernatural properties in order to give Jerry an excuse to not go on the zoo trip with them, saying that he doesn't think anyone should be forced to go to a zoo against their will, and that, while Jerry may be dumb, he has a right to take the fortune seriously if he really is so worried about it (and indeed, they soon discover that there's more to the cookies than it seems).
- After Hucksbee tells Rick and Jerry about his desire to escape and elope with the Lockerean alien monster, Rick skeptically asks if that's what the alien itself wants, since he knows it isn't sapient. The implication is that he's also asking if Hucksbee intends to force the creature to be with him. Maybe he's remembering Tommy and the Froopyland creatures.
- When Jennith and her forces bring Joyce from the airport to the confrontation with Rick and Jerry to try to force the latter to fulfill the condition (and thus, have sex with his mom)—having apparently told Joyce that Jerry "wants something and [she] should be the one to give it to him"—Rick immediately comments, "You sick fucks!" in utter disgust.
- Rick doesn't kill the one guard who gets the fortune that causes him to get stuck to walls, because he sympathizes that the man got one that sucked so much. When the fortune later causes the guard to be gruesomely sucked apart by the rift's pull, Rick in turn is rather mortified.
- At the end, he angrily slaps Jerry when the latter accidentally fulfills Rick's own fortune condition by calling him a friend. Jerry gets upset, whimpers in pain, and sounds like he's going to cry, and Rick immediately looks surprised and regretful and apologizes for it.
- Exact Words:
- Rick briefly considers killing Joyce to void Jerry's fortune, but changes his mind both because Jerry is horrified by the suggestion and her death wouldn't necessarily prevent Jerry from doing the deed.
- Rick is attacked by a guard with control over fire, then spots a guard with control over water. When he turns the latter against the former, both realize that "control over water" specifically means "control over existing water", i.e. the water inside the bodies of humans.
- Another guard is rendered immortal by a fortune. What he is not is invincible, as Rick hints moments before tricking another guard into shooting him with a gatling gun.
- Rick himself gets hit with this. He eats a fortune that simply states he'll make a new friend. It keeps him alive throughout the climax, only for Jerry to ruin it by calling him a friend when they get home. Jerry tries to rescind the friendship when Rick explains, but Rick points out the damage is done; it said he had to make a friend, not keep one.
- Face Death with Dignity: Hucksbee embraces his imminent death after realizing the Lockerean has no feelings for him at all and expresses no ill will from it.
- Forced Friendly Fire: One guard has a fortune guaranteeing that he'll get nothing but headshots in the fight. Rick promptly grabs his gun and forces him to shoot all his other guard friends in the head. When he fires at Rick directly, he slips his head into his neck like a turtle so the bullet immediately turns around and kills the guard.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus:
- Rick eats several fortune cookies during the fight at Fortune 500 to gain an advantage, and the fortune that he pockets and keeps is the one that says "You will make a new friend." At least one more fully-readable one is shown, though, that says "Your crush will call you." Foreshadowing, perhaps?
- One of the mooks Rick shoots blank fortune cookies at steps back and also closes his mouth, avoiding suffering a random fate as his comrades did. Unfortunately, he then trips on a banana — one of his transformed coworkers — breaking his neck.
- Friend-or-Idol Decision: When the Lockerean starts getting sucked into a void, Rick tries to save it to keep control over fortunes, until seeing Jerry about to land on top of his mother and/or be sucked into the void as well forces him to quickly write a fortune to undo Jerry's and release the creature.
- Funny Background Event: Once Rick starts shooting the fortune-less cookies with random effects into the guards' mouths, two guards in the background seem to give up on the fight, shrug, and start making out with each other (though this could also be an effect of the cookies). Freeze-Frame Bonus reveals that yes, they both had a fortune cookie thrown in their mouths moments before they start making out.
- Gorn: A man whose fate was "You will stick to walls" got well... stuck to a wall, after Rick threw him onto one. He lies stuck to the wall until a black hole appears. Initially it appeared as if he'd survive. However... his blood, intestines and every other visceral organs start to come out of his mouth with his skull and other bones finally tearing through his face.
- Groin Attack: Because he couldn't pay for his fortune, a random business guy (who has already clearly been tortured) is force-fed a fortune that says his penis will be mangled in a frozen yogurt machine at the UN.Business Guy: Oh, god! I know that machine! To anyone else this would be extremely implausible, but to me it's all too real!
- Gun Fu: Rick turns cartwheels while firing his guns at the Panda Express.
- Guns Akimbo: Rick shoots from two guns during the shootout at the Panda Express. Some of his opponents do too.
- Hand in the Hole: Or penis in the hole in this case. To test his theory about Jerry's fortune, Rick takes two shoeboxes, cuts a hole in each, and writes Joyce's name in one. Jerry instantly deduces the reason for the holes and insists on just picking boxes without looking, which still serves to prove the theory.
- Harmless Electrocution: Transformation Horror-ified Jennith shoots beams of electricity at Rick while he's making one last cookie from the Lockerean, electrocuting him to the point of X-Ray Sparks. It doesn't seem to do any damage at all, and Rick recovers instantly. Justified considering all of Rick's body modifications; it's no more egregious than him surviving numerous bullets right to the head.
- Heel–Face Door-Slam: One of Jennith's guards seems reluctant to go through with forcing Jerry to bang his mom and asks her if they're being given a chance to step back and examine their behavior...only for Rick to come up behind him and force one of the non-fortuned cookies into his mouth, which turns him into a baby.
- "Help! Help! Trapped in Title Factory!": The fortunesmith has been trying to get out of his job for years, so he started mass producing fortunes with obvious clues to come help him. Fortunes such as "You will break your leg unless you investigate this cookie company" or "Please, come help me or a virus will shut down the world." In Jerry's case, he's the only one who defied the fortune to have sex with his mom.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: One guard gains the fortune of getting nothing but headshots, causing his bullets to swerve in the air until they hit their mark. Unfortunately, Rick can retract his head, leaving the bullets nowhere to go but the guard's own head.
- Homing Projectile: A fortune granting nothing but headshots allows the guard's bullets to swerve in midair and avoid obstacles to reach their mark. However, said shots aren't specifically targeted so they can be dodged until they reach someone else's head, which Rick exploits.
- I Banged Your Mom: Rick jokes that he's actually had sex with Jerry's mom (while Rick is clearly joking, it's not out of the realm of possibility that he did at some point), and Jerry is naturally very unamused.
- I Love the Dead: Rick offers to kill Jerry's mother as a favor, which he naturally reacts to with horror, only to then rescind the offer because he realizes the fortune never specified she be alive for the act.
- Immortality Hurts: One guard receives a fortune of being unable to get killed. Unfortunately for him, he suffers unbearable pain when he is shot multiple times, believing that his ribs are shattered.
- Immortality Inducer:
- Unfulfilled fortunes are a temporary version of this. Because these fortunes are destined to come true, everyone they affect will be practically unkillable until they come to pass (in the sense that fate will bend to keep them alive), barring fortunes that can still come true while dead.
- A guard gets explicit immortality as his fortune. What he doesn't get is the Required Secondary Powers of Super-Toughness, a Healing Factor, or anything to mitigate the pain of injuries that would in any other circumstance kill him.
- Immune to Bullets: Rick is hit with several headshots thanks to a guard who has Homing Projectile bullets granted by a fortune, but all it does is slightly break the skin and Rick is barely affected.
- Innocent Innuendo: Poor Joyce, who has no idea that her son's fortune cookie has destined them to have sex, is quite confused by his subsequent behavior, and makes a few of these, such as:
- Sending Jerry a text that says "I NEED YOU" before finishing the sentence in the next text ("to answer the phone").
- She cheerfully tells Jerry that his "friends" (Jennith and her underlings) brought her to Fortune 500 because "you want something and I should be the one to give it to you".
- Jennith pushes Joyce down a ramp towards Jerry below; she slides down in some alien goop, lands in a suggestive position on the floor, and her dress rips near the bottom by the crotch, and she complains, "I'm so wet!" (From the goop.)
- Insane Troll Logic:
- Jerry dresses up as Morty, hoping that he could game the fortune so that he would end up having sex with Morty's mom (who is his wife, Beth) instead of his own.
- Old M. Hucksbee is revealed to be the one behind Jerry's fortune cookie message. It turns out he has been writing ludicrous fortunes in hopes of attracting someone into finding him to help him and the Lockerean making the fortune cookies escape. The only problem with this is that the people who receive their fortunes either don't take it seriously or fully embrace them. He implies that other people with the very same message as Jerry end up having sex with their own mothers.
- Instantly Proven Wrong: Upon finding the Lockerean in the depths of Fortune 500, Jerry remarks, "At least we have no idea what's going on." Rick, through some Techno Babble, then immediately identifies what kind of alien creature it is, what's wrong with it, and how the fortunes are being created from it, and Jerry corrects himself that they do know what's going on.
- It Makes Sense in Context: Lampshaded when someone who owes the company money is force-fed a cookie that says his penis will get mangled in a frozen yogurt machine at the United Nations.Investor: I know that machine! This would sound impossible to a layman, but to me it rings inevitable!
- It's All About Me: Rick initially thinks that what's happening to Jerry is to get to him because he can't imagine why anyone with god-like control over fate would otherwise bother with him. It turns out that Jerry getting that fortune, and subsequently getting Rick involved, was entirely incidental to a ploy by the person who wrote it to get anyone to help him. Even then, Rick elects to seize control over fate for himself, though he gives it up at the last minute to save Jerry and his mom.
- Jerkass Ball: Morty and Summer are exceptionally mean in this episode when bullying Jerry over his fear of the fortune coming true. They take a photo of him using tape on himself, texting an edited pic of his mom to him, and trapping him in a closet with a mannequin of his mother. It gets so bad that Rick is visibly uncomfortable and decides to go on a quest to help out Jerry.
- Laborious Laziness: Rick has a pair of Doctor Octopus-esque arms that he uses to feed himself Panda Express noodles, a spectacularly pointless use of his genius, right up there with the butter-passing sentient robot.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Hucksbee tried to escape his fortune-making job by creating fortunes that would get people to investigate the company. One of them was "Please, come help me or a virus will shut down the world." Apparently the folks who got that fortune weren't interested in investigating.
- Literal Genie: The fortunes do exactly what the message specifies and nothing else. Get immortality? Doesn't mean you're invincible. Control over water? The water has to come from somewhere (people, in this case).
- The Little Detecto: Rick brings out a device he uses to claim that Jerry's fortune needs investigating to get him out of being forced to go to the Zoo by the rest of the family. Rick then turns it on at Jerry's request and learns he really is fated to have sex with his mom, but tests it further to make sure. He later explains it measures aberrations along probability waves, and does a baseline reading of himself that says he's just as likely to poop a balloon as he is to become a dolphin.Jerry: Those are things that could happen?
Rick: (matter-of-factly) Jerry, everything is as likely as anything else. - Locked Out of the Loop: Joyce has no idea what Fortune 500 does and that her son got a binding, fate-altering fortune that will force him to have sex with her. She thinks Jennith and her guards are Jerry's friends who picked her up from the airport and brought her there to meet him for "Bring Your Mother to Work Day", and is highly confused by his desperation to stay away from her.
- Milkman Conspiracy: A global corporate conspiracy is being run by a fortune cookie company that has a way to make their fortune cookies come true.
- Misfortune Cookie: Jerry gets a fortune cookie saying he will have sex with his mother. Hucksbee explains he deliberately makes these types of fortunes in the hopes someone would come to the factory to investigate and help him.
- Monster Organ Trafficking: Rick and Jerry's investigation eventually uncovers that the fortune cookie company is making their fortunes come true through an alien creature called a Lockerean. Its species eats chaos, but it has a digestive disorder that allows its poop to be consumed to manipulate entropy. Its poop comes out as empty fortune cookies which make whatever fortune placed inside them inevitable.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The Season 6 trailer kicked off with the scene from this episode where Rick commands to his car to play Track 1 from his Favorites Playlist before launching into the trailer's music, implying this was leading up to a Moment of Awesome. While Rick does, indeed, easily defeat the Panda Express staff, the entire scene is actually Played for Laughs because of the Soundtrack Dissonance from the music that his ship plays.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Two from Jerry at the end in quick succession:
- He thanks Rick for saving him and reversing his unused fortune by writing "Thank you" onto the very last fate-controlling fortune in existence. As Rick points out, this was basically wasting it when they could have used it for anything.
- Jerry then cheerfully calls Rick his friend. Rick earlier received a fate-controlling fortune that he would make a new friend, and thus, this completes the condition, negating the immortality Rick had before it was fulfilled.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Jennith Padrow-Chunt is clearly a parody of Gwyneth Paltrow, with her obsession with vaginas and all.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Rick saving Jerry from his incestual fate takes away his biggest chance at controlling fate itself. He also loses his immortality because Jerry unknowingly fulfills his fortune of "making a new friend", as brief as it was.
- Parental Incest: Jerry spends the episode trying to avoid this since his fortune cookie predicted he'd have sex with his mother. Rick is eventually able to make a new fortune to reverse it and avert this fate.
- People Zoo: The "twist" in The Stinger that the zoo that Morty, Summer, and the Beths went to is actually a "human zoo". Morty seems disappointed by the predictability of it.
- Pet the Dog: The usual teasing and vitriol aside, Rick is actually remarkably nice to Jerry in this episode compared to his usual standards:
- When he sees Jerry being picked on by Summer and Morty and feeling pressured by an exasperated Beth, Rick lies to them to get Jerry out of having to go to the zoo with them when he's so upset. And soon, once he discovers that there actually are bigger forces at play with Jerry's fortune cookie, promptly brings him along on an adventure to investigate and get it fixed.
- Rick wants to take the fate-altering Lockerean for himself so he can directly control fate, and Jerry is understandably upset and worried that Rick would sacrifice him to get it. At the episode's climax, Rick, to his own chagrin, lets go of the Lockerean and lets it get sucked into the void so he can save Jerry and undo the latter's fortune of having sex with his mother.
- When Jerry gives Rick the "thank you" fortune at the end, Rick doesn't actually get mad at him over it despite dryly pointing out that Jerry wasted the last true, fate-binding fortune doing so, still stating that he appreciates the sentiment. He does get angry when Jerry accidentally negates Rick's immortality by calling him a friend and thus completing his fortune, and Dope Slaps him for it; however, when Jerry reacts in pain and is on the verge of weeping, Rick immediately looks abashed and apologizes for doing so.
- Phlebotinum Breakdown: Justified. Rick's self-defense mechanism breaks down during a fight with a security guard who just opened a cookie promising him "great success in a fight".
- Properly Paranoid: Jerry is weirded out by how specific his fortune cookie is that claims he'll have sex with his mom, and starts acting paranoid and erratic when his mom contacts him about coming to visit him. Beth, Summer, and Morty, naturally, think it's completely ridiculous that he's worried about it and taking the fortune so seriously, and mock him for it. As Jerry and Rick later discover, the cookies are made via a Lockerean's digestive tract that converts entropy into fate, meaning that the fortune is, in fact, binding, and Jerry really would have had to have intercourse with his mom if Rick hadn't intervened.
- Prophecy Armor: The fortune cookies, once consumed, guarantee the outcome written on the paper and will bend fate to make sure that outcome comes to pass. Rick exploits this by using Jerry as a human shield, knowing bullets will actively avoid hitting him, and Jennith gave herself the unattainable goal of being the most successful businesswoman on the planet to both make her incredibly successful and unstoppable. Rick defeats the latter by stealing enough money to buy her company and make her prophecy come true (then immediately steals it back to spite her), and simply makes a new fortune for Jerry to negate the first.
- Questionable Consent: Rick questions whether Hucksbee wanting to have sex with the rather non-sentient alien is an acceptable move.
- Ray Gun: In his assault on Panda Express, Rick dual wields blasters that fire beams that effortlessly slice through their targets.
- Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Old M. Hucksbee purposely wrote progressively crazier fortunes in the hopes that someone who received one would investigate Fiction 500. Unfortunately, these fortunes still work, and there were many of them sent out before Rick and Jerry arrived. Other people being forced into Parental Incest is the tamest implication of the chaos that ensued.
- Rewriting Reality: The fortunes in fortune cookies can be made true if the poop of an entropy-controlling alien space monster is eaten before reading them. This can make events inevitable, but can also immediately alter circumstance to grant people superpowers if they say things like "You can control fire".
- Shout-Out:
- The title is based on Final Destination.
- Morty and Summer change Rick's ringtone to the theme of Taxi, which is used for the battle at Panda Express and the credits.
- After Jerry becomes paranoid about his fortune cookie, Rick tells him in irritation, "It's not an X-File, Jerry, you got the world's last interesting fortune." (Of course, he turns out to be wrong about this.)
- Rick also makes a joke about Cookie Monster being the one behind creating the fortune cookies.
- Rick has a Sailor Moon Transformation Sequence at the ready in case he needs to save money on animation. He gets to use it on Jerry twice. He also references the Eye of Thundera, from Thunder Cats, in his own costume change.
- When Rick hacks into one of the company's control panels with a device in his arm, he whistles a few notes that sound like the beeps of R2-D2 from Star Wars.
- Old M. Hucksbee appears to be based on the Smoker who was in charge of the oil reserves in Waterworld.
- Rick asks, if Hucksbee can make any fortune he wants, why he doesn't use them for more useful things, such as, "At least get Nintendo to make a portable VR headset."
- When faced with a guard with fire powers and a guard who can control water, Rick tries to "Pokémon this shit" and use the water guard to take out the fire one.
- Fortune cookies being the excretions of a huge monstrous female alien reminds of the Futurama episode "Fry and the Slurm Factory" where the titular soda is revealed as the Slurm Queen's poop.
- Slow-Motion Fall: The climactic scene of naked Jerry falling towards his naked mother and Rick intervening is played in slow motion.
- Snap Back: The Night Family bankrupting the family in the previous episode goes unmentioned, with the family having bounced back with seemingly no issues.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: As Rick prepares to confront the Panda Express workers, he wants some awesome background music that he can kick ass to, and orders his ship to play Track 1 from his Favorites Playlist. This turns out to be the Taxi theme, a fairly calm, relaxing, cheerful-sounding song that was added by Morty and Summer as a joke; Rick looks chagrined for a moment before conceding that there are "no wrong answers" and rolls with it, resulting in him slaughtering the entire restaurant, Guns Akimbo, to this music.
- Special Person, Normal Name: When Jennith reads Jerry's unresolved fortune and plans to find his mother, she's annoyed to learn his last name is Smith, since it doesn't help narrow their search.
- The Stinger: Morty watches an ad for the zoo, which quickly derails into the visitors eating the zebra food and devolving into violence and debauchery. He starts questioning it, while Summer and the Beths look on in disinterest. He realizes that the zoo is for the animals and that the visitors are who feed them.
- Stock Footage: Lampshaded when Rick puts Jerry through a Sailor Moon Transformation Sequence, pointing out that they can save money by reusing the footage later if needed. It does get used again later.
- Stunned Silence: The whole diner goes silent after Jerry announces his Parental Incest cookie message.
- Suggestive Collision:
- When Rick first encounters the fighting fortune cookies, he gets his ass kicked by a guard who was promised success in a fight by one of them. He is sent flying onto Jerry, and they end up falling into a 69 position.
- This is about to happen, big-time, between Jerry and Joyce when a pants-less Jerry is being pulled towards the void and Joyce, whose dress is ripped and who's stuck on a limb near the void with her legs spread apart. Rick reversing Jerry's fortune causes them to narrowly avert it once the void closes and they fall to the ground.
- Take That!:
- Jennith Padrow-Chunt, being a barely veiled parody of Gwyneth Paltrow, is only a few letters removed from reading "Gwyneth Paltrow - Cunt."
- This line from Rick:Rick: Jerry, I'm going to tell you something I've never told anyone. We need to go to Panda Express.
- And in his dialogue with Jennith:Jennith: I used to think I was just a regular white woman. Then I discovered I could control my destiny.
Rick: All white women think that.
- Tear Off Your Face: In The Stinger, a woman affected by the zebra food bites off the face of another visitor.
- Too Dumb to Live: Somehow, everyone at the zoo fails to realize the food in the dispensers is only for the animals. Yet they keep eating it, leading to sickness and insanity, killing each other in the process. The Smiths avoid this as Morty figures it out.
- Transformation Horror: When Jennith gobbles down a bunch of random fortunes to get a leg up on Rick, she goes full AKIRA from all the conflicting fates.
- Unpredictable Results: A box full of unassigned fortune cookies causes completely random fates to whoever eats them; turning people into machines, babies, animals, etc. Some even fall in love with the nearest person.
- Victory Is Boring: Rick sarcastically asks Jennith whether reaching her goal of becoming the most successful business woman did her any good:Rick: How does it feel to achieve your dreams? Empty, right? Like when DiCaprio won the Oscar. You could see it in his face.
- Wham Line: What seems like the Smiths having an ordinary dinner at Panda Express quickly gets flipped the moment Jerry reads his fortune cookie; he and everyone in the restaurant go dead silent:"You will have sex with your mother."
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: One of the guards who equip themselves with a fortune is merely given the power to stick to walls. Rick just smacks his body against a wall to incapacitate him, sparing him out of pity for getting a dud. It seemingly turns into Heart Is an Awesome Power when a black hole sucks everything in while the guard remains stuck to the wall....only for his internal organs to be sucked out of his body. Even Rick thinks this was a pretty horrific fate.
- You Can't Fight Fate:
- The Fortune 500 company is using a space alien called a Lockerean, whose digestive system turns entropy into fate. Her fecal matter is molded into fortune cookies, which then turns the fortunes inside into an absolute guarantee. You can delay things, but probability will fold in on itself to ensure the fortune is resolved.
- No matter how hard he tries, Jerry can't escape his inevitable fate with his mother, with some help from the Fortune 500. It's only thanks to Rick feeding him another fortune cookie that very, very narrowly subverts this.
- You No Take Candle: Since Rick's arm-robots have mere seconds to write a new fortune for Jerry before they're all pulled into a black hole, they hastily scribble "Jerry No Sex Mom" before Rick tosses the fortune down his throat.
